Page 26 of Smoke
“I think that’s a great idea. How about you Little girls make pallets on the floor and I’ll make some popcorn.”
Smiling, I nodded. Maybe we could still make it a good night.
Chapter Eight
Smoke
I slid my clean shirt on and slammed my truck door with a bit too much force.
“I know it’s hard to leave her the first time,” Bash said as we pulled out of my driveway.
“Just the first time?” I asked, knowing he was full of shit.
“Okay, it sucks every damn time,” he admitted.
I nodded; that sounded more like it.
“I fucking hate it. I love knowing we make the world safer for them, but damn, it’s hard,” Blade said from the backseat.
“Have you ever thought about not doing it anymore?” I asked.
“Every damn time the phone rings,” Bash admitted.
“Every time Eloise tells me she’s thankful we found each other,” Blade said, his voice thick with vulnerability.
I looked at him in the rearview mirror.
He shrugged. “She doesn’t have anyone else. After her parents died and she escaped her abusive ex and his cult, she was on her own for a long time. Knowing that I could die during these jobs, knowing I could potentially leave her alone again, that’s fucking hard.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat at the idea of Ashley being alone.
“I know that she wouldn’t be truly alone. I trust you all would look out for her, but the idea of putting myself into a position where I could be killed eats at me every time I walk out the damn door,” Blade explained.
“Allyson has asked me if I could be hurt or killed,” Bash admitted.
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
He chuckled, but it didn’t sound real. “That hell didn’t want me back, so I wouldn’t die.”
Blade and I scoffed out a laugh, but the air in the truck had gotten heavy.
“You both are stronger than I am. I want to tell Jasper to go fuck himself and go back to my baby,” I said.
“I have that same battle every time I walk out the damn door,” Bash said.
“Me too,” Blade added.
I pulled the truck into the entrance of one of Jasper’s buildings and punched the code into the gate. The keypad flashed red. Frowning, I punched in the code again. I was met with more flashes of red.
“What’s wrong?” Blade asked.
“What code did Jasper text us?” I asked, annoyed that I must have jumbled it up. Jasper changed the codes often, but he never sent us the wrong one.
“1221,” Bash said.
“1224,” Blade answered just as quickly.
My annoyance quickly turned to horror. I’d been sent 1226. Each code was different and in increments of two. Nobody would know we’d been together and were riding into the factory together. The few minutes it would take us to punch in the code a second time was enough time for each of us to be ambushed. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a setup.
